Homeschooling as an Act of Resistance
by Kimberlee H. Rackley
Homeschooling is an act of resistance for my family. Homeschooling is a liberatory practice. It is a deliberate protest against racism. Homeschooling typically means something different for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) than it does for white families.
We embarked on our homeschool journey as involuntary homeschoolers, of sorts. As a third-generation public-school educator myself, I believe in the transformative power of a culturally responsive, liberal arts education. We set out to make traditional schooling work for our children. I was active in the PTA, served as room parent, served on diversity committees, and even taught in the same school that my oldest child attended at times. Despite our best efforts to be active and engaged parents, it became abundantly clear once our oldest entered middle school and our middle child started first grade that homeschooling our children was the only way our children could get a culturally responsive education. As such, we set out to provide our children with a home education that prioritizes their mental and physical well-being. Our purpose is not only to promote a cultural connection to our heritage as Black Americans, but to also provide an environment where our children can be free of the white gaze while learning and growing.
The events that set our homeschooling in motion began in a suburban town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The town’s demographics are pretty similar to those of Newtown. Ironically, our home relocation tour was on December 14, 2012. The relocation specialist knew the area very well, so well that her first stop was in her subdivision in a massive suburban community. Her child was enrolled in the public schools, and the schools were, in her estimation, “excellent”. She assured us that we could not go wrong if we decided to live there.
Apprehensive that our experiences would be interchangeable with hers, we settled on renting a home in that same subdivision community. You know the ones, tree lined streets, sidewalks, a nice pool, playground, and tennis courts. We hoped that renting would afford us the time to better gauge the seventy-five-minute commute for my husband and the schools for our children. Yes, this was as close as we could get to some semblance of diversity as the town my husband would travel to work in was buried deep in rural Western Pennsylvania. Forty-three minutes from Youngstown, Ohio to be exact. At this point in our parenting journey, we had come to terms with the fact that “good schools” are not “good” for all. We needed more time before planting roots in Western Pennsylvania.
Though we were concerned about relocating in the middle of the school year, our previous cross-region relocation had proved our oldest daughter to be adaptable. She had been identified as academically gifted in 4th grade. In her new school we were told that she would need to be reassessed in order for her to continue these services. After doing a little digging, I concluded that I was given erroneous information. The evaluations were less than a year old, were current, and her previous Gifted Individualized Education Plan (GIEP) should be honored. After a series of back and forth, meetings, and conferences I managed to win the first of what would be many battles. Over the next year, we would discover that despite being qualified, our daughter would not be placed in the advanced math and science courses in middle school. The ever-present opportunity gap that BIPOC children experience in traditional schools had evolved into blatant and intentional opportunity hoarding. It was clear that the intention was to deny her access to opportunities that were being provided for her peers.
Shortly after arriving during the second semester of 5th grade, our oldest daughter was assigned the task of creating a presentation of her family immigration story complete with an heirloom to share with the class. She attempted to explain to the teacher that this would be a difficult assignment for her. My daughter didn’t think the teacher understood what she was trying to communicate, which prompted me to explain to the teacher that Black Americans do not have the traditional immigration story, and that tangible heirlooms such as the family crest or jewelry (which were the exact examples included in the instructions) were uncommon as well. Nevertheless, our daughter told the story of her ancestors' enslavement to 5th graders who had absolutely no context for this history. She explained that this was the reason why she had no heirlooms, family crest, and the like. She explained that recipes were like heirlooms and shared tea with her classmates. The response? One of the kids told her to “hold my jacket, slave” during recess.
She told me about the incident weeks after it happened. This would be a consistent pattern. In order to avoid the stigma of the racism that she encountered, our child chose to not involve us until situations were untenable. If she were in the care of professionals equipped to guide her through these incidents of racial abuse, one could reasonably assume that everything would be handled with care and that we would be informed so that we could secure the proper resources to help her manage any post-incident anxiety. However, those who were charged with her socio-emotional development did not have the capacity to be concerned about how these incidents impacted her.
Our middle daughter started kindergarten in the fall of 2013. She was so prepared. She effortlessly whizzed through her kindergarten assessments. The school curriculum facilitator informed us that based on the assessment data, our daughter would be entering kindergarten capable of doing 3rd grade level work. We were confident that if the school had taken the time to formally assess her, then surely they would use the data to provide an education that would meet her needs. Our hope was that kindergarten would be an opportunity for our daughter to develop socially and emotionally, and get acclimated to the demands of school. Kindergarten was a wonderful experience for her, filled with friends and birthday parties, and a teacher who was expertly skilled at affirming and celebrating her differences. Our daughter grew leaps and bounds academically, developed leadership skills, and was accepted by her peers.
Well, if our middle daughter’s kindergarten experience was the zenith, then her first grade experience was the nadir. For starters, she was placed in a classroom with absolutely no one from her kindergarten class. Life is full of challenges and we must learn how to adapt to them. For this reason, we felt that we could coach our daughter through this challenging social situation. After all, she had seamlessly mastered kindergarten. Despite our best efforts to be encouraging and affirming parents, it became apparent that this year was going to be filled with obstacles. After the 2nd week of school, we learned that our daughter was being sent to other classrooms for both reading and math. When I inquired about this, I was informed that she was above level in both subjects and that this was the best arrangement for ensuring her academic needs were met. My immediate reaction was rooted in my professional experiences as an educator. Switching classes two times a day - when this is not the norm for the entire class - and not being able to build bonds with the students in her assigned classroom would create a problem for her.
As the room parent, an active PTA parent, and the mother of a new kindergartner (our youngest started kindergarten that fall, with the same talented teacher our middle daughter had), I spent quite a bit of time on the school campus. I would pull up to the school amid the shrills and laughter of kids playing during recess and notice my daughter all alone on the playground. I also took note that there were two BIPOC students who always seemed to be withdrawn during recess. Over time I would come to notice a pattern of the retention of Black male students, BIPOC students waiting in the office for the administrator at the start of the school day (thus missing class), a dearth of Black students identified as Gifted and Talented, and no BIPOC teachers.
Science and research has proven time and time again that children have learned racial bias in facial recognition by 3 months of age. Black children as young as 3 years old have been shown to have significantly lower self-esteem based on their own identification of their skin color (2) (Clark, B. and Clark, M., 1940’s. “The Doll Test”), which has also been linked to lower academic achievement. Black students are significantly more likely to receive discipline resulting in removal from the classroom (suspensions, expulsions, referrals to law enforcement, and more) than their peers, which has been directly linked to incarceration rates (3,4). This phenomenon is known as the School to Prison Pipeline. And though I knew that we would fight valiantly to ensure that our children would not slip between the cracks, we had no confidence that our children would be able to have teachers and school administrators who were vested in their mental and physical safety, knowledgeable about their cultural experiences, and vested in their academic success.
I would be remiss if I neglected to mention that we were witnessing academic decline in our oldest daughter. We confronted the school with questions about her academic growth. Despite being identified as intellectually gifted with standardized test results in the top 5 percent, we were noticing a drop in her testing data. We were told that such a drop was normal in high performing students. We soon discovered that her math teacher was not adept at her content area. She taught the class using a binder that was prepared for her by a colleague. The colleague was also the math teacher’s tutor. You should know that this teacher would dress up as a princess during class, tiara and all. During math class, my daughter would ask questions and she would respond, “I am a princess, so I don’t have to answer that question.”
The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was when our middle daughter came home with a racially insensitive and disturbing book to read aloud to us. Notwithstanding the fact that this book was significantly below our child’s reading level (it had become a battle to get level appropriate reading material for her), the book, Little Quack, was written in the 1950s, and it showed. Here’s an excerpt:
We embarked on our homeschool journey as involuntary homeschoolers, of sorts. As a third-generation public-school educator myself, I believe in the transformative power of a culturally responsive, liberal arts education. We set out to make traditional schooling work for our children. I was active in the PTA, served as room parent, served on diversity committees, and even taught in the same school that my oldest child attended at times. Despite our best efforts to be active and engaged parents, it became abundantly clear once our oldest entered middle school and our middle child started first grade that homeschooling our children was the only way our children could get a culturally responsive education. As such, we set out to provide our children with a home education that prioritizes their mental and physical well-being. Our purpose is not only to promote a cultural connection to our heritage as Black Americans, but to also provide an environment where our children can be free of the white gaze while learning and growing.
The events that set our homeschooling in motion began in a suburban town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The town’s demographics are pretty similar to those of Newtown. Ironically, our home relocation tour was on December 14, 2012. The relocation specialist knew the area very well, so well that her first stop was in her subdivision in a massive suburban community. Her child was enrolled in the public schools, and the schools were, in her estimation, “excellent”. She assured us that we could not go wrong if we decided to live there.
Apprehensive that our experiences would be interchangeable with hers, we settled on renting a home in that same subdivision community. You know the ones, tree lined streets, sidewalks, a nice pool, playground, and tennis courts. We hoped that renting would afford us the time to better gauge the seventy-five-minute commute for my husband and the schools for our children. Yes, this was as close as we could get to some semblance of diversity as the town my husband would travel to work in was buried deep in rural Western Pennsylvania. Forty-three minutes from Youngstown, Ohio to be exact. At this point in our parenting journey, we had come to terms with the fact that “good schools” are not “good” for all. We needed more time before planting roots in Western Pennsylvania.
Though we were concerned about relocating in the middle of the school year, our previous cross-region relocation had proved our oldest daughter to be adaptable. She had been identified as academically gifted in 4th grade. In her new school we were told that she would need to be reassessed in order for her to continue these services. After doing a little digging, I concluded that I was given erroneous information. The evaluations were less than a year old, were current, and her previous Gifted Individualized Education Plan (GIEP) should be honored. After a series of back and forth, meetings, and conferences I managed to win the first of what would be many battles. Over the next year, we would discover that despite being qualified, our daughter would not be placed in the advanced math and science courses in middle school. The ever-present opportunity gap that BIPOC children experience in traditional schools had evolved into blatant and intentional opportunity hoarding. It was clear that the intention was to deny her access to opportunities that were being provided for her peers.
Shortly after arriving during the second semester of 5th grade, our oldest daughter was assigned the task of creating a presentation of her family immigration story complete with an heirloom to share with the class. She attempted to explain to the teacher that this would be a difficult assignment for her. My daughter didn’t think the teacher understood what she was trying to communicate, which prompted me to explain to the teacher that Black Americans do not have the traditional immigration story, and that tangible heirlooms such as the family crest or jewelry (which were the exact examples included in the instructions) were uncommon as well. Nevertheless, our daughter told the story of her ancestors' enslavement to 5th graders who had absolutely no context for this history. She explained that this was the reason why she had no heirlooms, family crest, and the like. She explained that recipes were like heirlooms and shared tea with her classmates. The response? One of the kids told her to “hold my jacket, slave” during recess.
She told me about the incident weeks after it happened. This would be a consistent pattern. In order to avoid the stigma of the racism that she encountered, our child chose to not involve us until situations were untenable. If she were in the care of professionals equipped to guide her through these incidents of racial abuse, one could reasonably assume that everything would be handled with care and that we would be informed so that we could secure the proper resources to help her manage any post-incident anxiety. However, those who were charged with her socio-emotional development did not have the capacity to be concerned about how these incidents impacted her.
Our middle daughter started kindergarten in the fall of 2013. She was so prepared. She effortlessly whizzed through her kindergarten assessments. The school curriculum facilitator informed us that based on the assessment data, our daughter would be entering kindergarten capable of doing 3rd grade level work. We were confident that if the school had taken the time to formally assess her, then surely they would use the data to provide an education that would meet her needs. Our hope was that kindergarten would be an opportunity for our daughter to develop socially and emotionally, and get acclimated to the demands of school. Kindergarten was a wonderful experience for her, filled with friends and birthday parties, and a teacher who was expertly skilled at affirming and celebrating her differences. Our daughter grew leaps and bounds academically, developed leadership skills, and was accepted by her peers.
Well, if our middle daughter’s kindergarten experience was the zenith, then her first grade experience was the nadir. For starters, she was placed in a classroom with absolutely no one from her kindergarten class. Life is full of challenges and we must learn how to adapt to them. For this reason, we felt that we could coach our daughter through this challenging social situation. After all, she had seamlessly mastered kindergarten. Despite our best efforts to be encouraging and affirming parents, it became apparent that this year was going to be filled with obstacles. After the 2nd week of school, we learned that our daughter was being sent to other classrooms for both reading and math. When I inquired about this, I was informed that she was above level in both subjects and that this was the best arrangement for ensuring her academic needs were met. My immediate reaction was rooted in my professional experiences as an educator. Switching classes two times a day - when this is not the norm for the entire class - and not being able to build bonds with the students in her assigned classroom would create a problem for her.
As the room parent, an active PTA parent, and the mother of a new kindergartner (our youngest started kindergarten that fall, with the same talented teacher our middle daughter had), I spent quite a bit of time on the school campus. I would pull up to the school amid the shrills and laughter of kids playing during recess and notice my daughter all alone on the playground. I also took note that there were two BIPOC students who always seemed to be withdrawn during recess. Over time I would come to notice a pattern of the retention of Black male students, BIPOC students waiting in the office for the administrator at the start of the school day (thus missing class), a dearth of Black students identified as Gifted and Talented, and no BIPOC teachers.
Science and research has proven time and time again that children have learned racial bias in facial recognition by 3 months of age. Black children as young as 3 years old have been shown to have significantly lower self-esteem based on their own identification of their skin color (2) (Clark, B. and Clark, M., 1940’s. “The Doll Test”), which has also been linked to lower academic achievement. Black students are significantly more likely to receive discipline resulting in removal from the classroom (suspensions, expulsions, referrals to law enforcement, and more) than their peers, which has been directly linked to incarceration rates (3,4). This phenomenon is known as the School to Prison Pipeline. And though I knew that we would fight valiantly to ensure that our children would not slip between the cracks, we had no confidence that our children would be able to have teachers and school administrators who were vested in their mental and physical safety, knowledgeable about their cultural experiences, and vested in their academic success.
I would be remiss if I neglected to mention that we were witnessing academic decline in our oldest daughter. We confronted the school with questions about her academic growth. Despite being identified as intellectually gifted with standardized test results in the top 5 percent, we were noticing a drop in her testing data. We were told that such a drop was normal in high performing students. We soon discovered that her math teacher was not adept at her content area. She taught the class using a binder that was prepared for her by a colleague. The colleague was also the math teacher’s tutor. You should know that this teacher would dress up as a princess during class, tiara and all. During math class, my daughter would ask questions and she would respond, “I am a princess, so I don’t have to answer that question.”
The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was when our middle daughter came home with a racially insensitive and disturbing book to read aloud to us. Notwithstanding the fact that this book was significantly below our child’s reading level (it had become a battle to get level appropriate reading material for her), the book, Little Quack, was written in the 1950s, and it showed. Here’s an excerpt:
We were flabbergasted! How long had this book been on the shelves? How many of our daughter’s peers had read this book? What other archaic reading material was there? This was not okay. We had a conference with the principal, the teacher, and we were assured that the shelves would be combed and this book and others like it would be removed. Hesitant, we sent our child back to school only for her to get another archaic and similarly racially insensitive take-home read. That was it for us! We decided that homeschooling was the only way for us to ensure that our children get an education rooted in culturally responsive teaching practices and that they could be emotionally safe.
Since making that decision seven years ago, we have moved to Connecticut. Newtown is the community that we chose to settle in for a myriad of reasons. The “good school district” is not one of them. Our first glance of the school district indicated that homeschooling would be the only way for us to continue to provide a culturally responsive education. Recent studies indicate that Connecticut has much work to do with regards to educational equity. Connecticut continues to have an overwhelmingly white teacher population. 91.4 percent of teachers are white, while educators of color account for only 8.3 percent of the state’s total teaching staff. In 2011, Connecticut was graded “F” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for the lack of quality teaching and learning standards as it relates to instruction on the Civil Rights Movement. As recently as last year, Connecticut teachers reported feeling uncomfortable and ill equipped to teach about slavery. The literature also suggests that Black students are more likely to enroll in college if they have one Black teacher by third grade. The data also indicates that there is a direct correlation between Black students who have Black teachers and academic achievement on the whole. The Newtown school district reflected these statistics.
While I remain hopeful that Newtown Schools will one day meet the needs of all its students, my family CANNOT wait on them to update their policies, practices, and curriculum. We want our children to be openly and loudly affirmed by all who have the privilege of teaching them. Seven years later and we are still repairing the damage done to our beautiful girls. We are just now seeing our middle child's confidence return after years of being socially withdrawn due to her first grade experience. She recently confided in us about how horribly she was treated in school. We had no idea that while she was in her leveled math and reading class, one of her classmates was going into her desk, taking her pencils from her pencil pouch and breaking them in half. We asked her why she did not tell us, and let her know that we would have intervened to protect her. In a melancholy voice she replied, “I told my teacher, the person who I was supposed to turn to. She did nothing.” Seven years later, and this still resonates with her. Frederick Douglass once said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” For us, homeschooling is a means to raising strong, self-assured children.
Since making that decision seven years ago, we have moved to Connecticut. Newtown is the community that we chose to settle in for a myriad of reasons. The “good school district” is not one of them. Our first glance of the school district indicated that homeschooling would be the only way for us to continue to provide a culturally responsive education. Recent studies indicate that Connecticut has much work to do with regards to educational equity. Connecticut continues to have an overwhelmingly white teacher population. 91.4 percent of teachers are white, while educators of color account for only 8.3 percent of the state’s total teaching staff. In 2011, Connecticut was graded “F” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for the lack of quality teaching and learning standards as it relates to instruction on the Civil Rights Movement. As recently as last year, Connecticut teachers reported feeling uncomfortable and ill equipped to teach about slavery. The literature also suggests that Black students are more likely to enroll in college if they have one Black teacher by third grade. The data also indicates that there is a direct correlation between Black students who have Black teachers and academic achievement on the whole. The Newtown school district reflected these statistics.
While I remain hopeful that Newtown Schools will one day meet the needs of all its students, my family CANNOT wait on them to update their policies, practices, and curriculum. We want our children to be openly and loudly affirmed by all who have the privilege of teaching them. Seven years later and we are still repairing the damage done to our beautiful girls. We are just now seeing our middle child's confidence return after years of being socially withdrawn due to her first grade experience. She recently confided in us about how horribly she was treated in school. We had no idea that while she was in her leveled math and reading class, one of her classmates was going into her desk, taking her pencils from her pencil pouch and breaking them in half. We asked her why she did not tell us, and let her know that we would have intervened to protect her. In a melancholy voice she replied, “I told my teacher, the person who I was supposed to turn to. She did nothing.” Seven years later, and this still resonates with her. Frederick Douglass once said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” For us, homeschooling is a means to raising strong, self-assured children.
Sources Used:
Kelly DJ, Quinn PC, Slater AM, et al. Three-month-olds, but not newborns, prefer own-race faces. Dev Sci. 2005;8(6):F31‐F36. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2005.0434a.x
Clark, B. and Clark, M., 1940’s. “The Doll Test”. https://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/05/13/doll.study.1947.pdf
Ramey, D. M. (2016). The influence of early school punishment and therapy/medication on social control experiences during young adulthood [Abstract]. Criminology, 54(1), 113-141.Monahan, K. C.,
VanDerhei, S., Bechtold, J., & Cauffman, E. (2014). From the school yard to the squad car: School discipline, truancy, and arrest.Journal of Youth and Adolescence,43(7), 1110–1122.
J. S., & Tetlock, P. E. (1999). Accounting for the effects of accountability. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 255-275.
Estrada-Perez C., Khattar, V., Skene, E. and Tuzzolo, E. (2020) CT schools must close the achievement gap more quickly, CT Mirror. https://ctmirror.org/category/ct-viewpoints/ct-schools-must-close-the-achievement-gap-more-quickly/?fbclid=IwAR31hJECU_vFWRtTczNg1mEIwrdrOF4E8wkfTR7Tv4UK4S90hzoso4dwE7k
Kelly DJ, Quinn PC, Slater AM, et al. Three-month-olds, but not newborns, prefer own-race faces. Dev Sci. 2005;8(6):F31‐F36. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2005.0434a.x
Clark, B. and Clark, M., 1940’s. “The Doll Test”. https://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/05/13/doll.study.1947.pdf
Ramey, D. M. (2016). The influence of early school punishment and therapy/medication on social control experiences during young adulthood [Abstract]. Criminology, 54(1), 113-141.Monahan, K. C.,
VanDerhei, S., Bechtold, J., & Cauffman, E. (2014). From the school yard to the squad car: School discipline, truancy, and arrest.Journal of Youth and Adolescence,43(7), 1110–1122.
J. S., & Tetlock, P. E. (1999). Accounting for the effects of accountability. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 255-275.
Estrada-Perez C., Khattar, V., Skene, E. and Tuzzolo, E. (2020) CT schools must close the achievement gap more quickly, CT Mirror. https://ctmirror.org/category/ct-viewpoints/ct-schools-must-close-the-achievement-gap-more-quickly/?fbclid=IwAR31hJECU_vFWRtTczNg1mEIwrdrOF4E8wkfTR7Tv4UK4S90hzoso4dwE7k